Interviews, Videos, Speeches and More

Selected Organic History Milestones

1911    F.H. King, former chief of USDA’ s Division of Soil Management, wrote Farmers of Forty Centuries, a classic that described how people in China farmed the same fields for 4,000 years without destroying their fertility. 1940    The first use of the term “organic farming” was in Look to the Land, the book by Lord Northbourne

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Presentation: A Brief History of the Organic Farming Movement in the Midwest in the 1970s

Who These Early Organic Farmers Were, The Barriers They Had to Overcome, and How They Built the Movement Together A workshop at the 2011 MOSES Organic Farming Conference by Roger Blobaum, (February 2011) “When I was invited to present a workshop on the history of organic farming, the workshop coordinator and I agreed that the history was too large a topic to cover in one workshop session.  The result was a presentation limited to the history of organic farming in the Midwest in the 1970s.” — Roger Blobaum

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Speech: “The Evolution Of Organic Research From The 1970s to 2010” given at the U of M Lamberton Research Station | July 2010

Organic Field Day Presentation by Roger Blobaum, Lamberton, Minnesota, July 8, 2010 I am here today representing The Ceres Trust, a national foundation that makes organic farming a priority. It is not appropriate for me, as a foundation representative, to talk about mobilizing political support for organic research. But I can talk about the impact political action has had on organic research in the past and the persistent efforts of organic farmers and others to build support for organic research.

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